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NAFTA has proven to be a MAJOR scar on President Clinton's legacy (and there's been bleed-thru in regards to the candidacy of Secretary Clinton). WHY does President Obama feel this is absolutely essential?

Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush made an unannounced stop in Krakow on Wednesday to tour the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

Bush toured the camp with wife, Columba, Bloomberg confirmed. He didn't invite the roughly 10 reporters from the U.S. and Europe following the former Florida governor on his five-day, three-country tour, out of respect for the site and those affected, a Bush aide said.

More than 1 million people, mostly Jewish prisoners, died at the camp during World War II.

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Hmmm... I seem to recall an ancestor of Jeb's was more than happy to do business with Nazi Germany up to WW2. Name escapes me...

(CNN)The Federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has launched an investigation into deaths of babies following open heart surgeries at St. Mary's Medical Center in Florida.

The investigation came in response to a CNN story this week that showed between 2011 to 2013, the West Palm Beach hospital had a 12.5% mortality rate for open heart surgery, three times the national average.

"We take these allegations very seriously. CMS is actively investigating these complaints," Aaron Albright, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote in an email. The agency is investigating because most of the patients who had heart surgery at St. Mary's were Medicaid patients.

Usaamah Rahim, the man fatally shot after waving a military knife at officers, had been plotting to behead Pamela Geller, an activist and conservative blogger, law enforcement sources told CNN. Geller drew national attention last month after police thwarted an attack on an event her organization was sponsoring in Garland, Texas.

Usaamah Rahim, who was fatally shot after waving a military knife at law enforcement officers, was originally plotting to behead a prominent New York resident targeted in other terror plots, three law enforcement sources told CNN on Wednesday.

But Rahim, a 26-year-old security guard who officials believe was radicalized by ISIS and other extremists, decided instead to target the "boys in blue," a reference to police, according to court documents. "I can't wait that long," he said of the original beheading plan, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court in Boston on Wednesday.

About two hours before Rahim's confrontation with officers on a Boston Street, he allegedly told an associate he was "going to ... go after them, those boys in blue. 'Cause ... it's the easiest target," the documents say.

The role of robust, state-sponsored force in America’s racial conflicts, which so shocked the country in Ferguson, Missouri, this month is far from unprecedented. In just one but by far the bloodiest example, the Tulsa race riot of 1921, the local police armed and enlisted white men to fight groups of blacks who had taken up weapons and called in the National Guard to “restore order”—which at the time meant rounding up black men en masse and putting them in detention camps. When a rumor started that men were coming from a nearby Oklahoma town to help defend Greenwood, the besieged black community, Tulsa authorities put out a machine gun crew to stop them.

The result was the largest civil disturbance in American history, claiming 300 lives and destroying more than 1,200 homes in a prosperous community known as Tulsa’s Black Wall Street. Then, for the next 80 years, Tulsans both black and white did their best to ensure that the horror disappeared into history.
Tim Madigan is a writer living in Texas and the author of The Burning: Massacre, Destruction and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and I'm Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers. You can follow him on Twitter at @tsmadigan.

The Tulsa race riot was a large-scale, racially motivated conflict on May 31 and June 1, 1921, in which a group of whites attacked the black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It resulted in the Greenwood District, also known as 'the Black Wall Street' and the wealthiest black community in the United States, being burned to the ground.

During the 16 hours of the assault, more than 800 people were admitted to local white hospitals with injuries (the two black hospitals were burned down), and police arrested and detained more than 6,000 black Greenwood residents at three local facilities. An estimated 10,000 blacks were left homeless, and 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire. The official count of the dead by the Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics was 39, but other estimates of black fatalities vary from 55 to about 300.

The events of the riot were long omitted from local and state histories. "The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place." With the number of survivors declining, in 1996, the state legislature commissioned a report to establish the historical record of the events, and acknowledge the victims and damages to the black community. Released in 2001, the report included the commission's recommendations for some compensatory actions, most of which were not implemented by the state and city governments. The state passed legislation to establish some scholarships for descendants of survivors, economic development of Greenwood, and a memorial park to the victims in Tulsa. The latter was dedicated in 2010.